Building the blog on Mac OS

Mac OS is a BSD-based system. It’s similar to linux, but there are some key differences in basic commands.

• date behaves quite a bit differently than in GNU coreutils. POSIX standard only specifies support -u flag. To do something like date --date=2024-01-01 -Ru there’s -f flag to parse input date according to specified format.
• bash version is 3.2.57 and it won’t be updated due to the GPLv3 license. My bleat script for microblog used bash arrays, so that needed a complete rewrite.
• GNU find utility has -xtype to find broken symlinks. That’s sadly unavailable on Mac.

It required a partial rewrite of the blog generation scripts. Thankfully, now both linux and mac os builds are working.